A Definitive fMRI Test for Narcissism

Put a hand on your widow's peak. About an inch below your fingertips in your medial prefrontal cortex is the home of your sense of self. Julian Keenan, director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Lab at Montclair State University, did a nifty trick: He used what is effectively an electric Ping-Pong paddle to zap this region in healthy subjects, overexciting every neuron within range, and thus for about a fifth of a second, knocking that one-cubic-centimeter area of the brain off the grid.

And while he did this, he flashed pictures of faces. Blasted subjects retained the ability to recognize faces of loved ones or even learned strangers, but for this fifth of a second, they failed to recognize themselves.

Interestingly, there's one type of person who retains sense of self even with the medial prefrontal cortex blasted: narcissists.

When I interviewed him for my book, Brain Trust, Keenan explained that, "in narcissists, more brain areas are dedicated to self-deception." So when a narcissist's medial prefrontal cortex is taken offline, backup generators are in place to maintain that overblown sense of self.

It's a stark enough difference that soon there may be a neuroimaging diagnosis of narcissism. Does your sense of self sit in the medial prefrontal cortex box designed for it, or does it creep out to colonize other areas of your brain?

Neuroimaging knows and should soon settle all doubts as to who is, and who isn't, a narcissist.

How far did this study investigate the effects of these "other" areas of the brain that act as "back up". Is there supportable evidence in the elasticity of the brain and it's ability to teach other structures to take on the function of others?

For instance, in a narcissist this is a cognitive feature held in the how the individual views themselves and their role/place in the world. Thus is it safe to speculate that cognitions can play a role in re-purposing brain structures?

And I wish I had a better answer for you. I know that in this study, narcissists use additional brain structures to maintain a sense of self -- but I'm not sure which is the chicken and which the egg. Do narcissists *naturally* have involvement from these other brain structures, or does developing narcissism *create* this involvement? Is it parent-given genetics or is it plasticity? Hmmm, if you find an answer, I'd love to know!

Epigenetics means whether an inherited gene is (or sets of genes are) "turned on" or "turned off"; this adds yet another exponentially complicating factor to the puzzle of how and why individual personalities develop, and how and why personality disorders develop.

I am a big fan of the hard sciences having the potential to more accurately diagnose mental illnesses, allowing a more targeted and effective approach to treatment at an earlier stage.

There is another research study showing that the brains of those with borderline pd do not process some incoming emotional information at all. A very specific area of the bpd test subjects' brains did not "light up" when the borderline test subjects were *receiving goods*, although both the bpd test subjects' and the non-pd test subjects' brains "lit up" in exactly the same way when each was *giving goods.* This fascinating phenomenon shows that in at least some aspects, borderline pd is probably an organic defect or injury; their "wiring" is messed up.

Here's the link to that study:
http://www.bcm.edu/news/item.cfm?newsID=1177

For the longest time I have been thinking that personality disorders must have an organic component, a real physical malfunction, which makes them so intractable. Once these physical, organic aspects of personality disorder can be better understood and mapped and studied, then it seems to me to offer more hope of developing better treatments for repairing the parts of the brain that aren't working right, or developing strategies for bypassing the areas that are defective and utilizing other areas instead, possibly. I see much potential for hope for better treatments for mental illnesses and possibly even cures within the "hard" sciences (neurochemistry, neurobiology, etc.)

This is SUCH a tricky topic! Should we be allowed to look inside a plantiff's brain to see the extent of their pain when deciding on the payment for a personal injury case? Should insurance companies be allowed to look inside applicants' brains for signatures that predict later development of Alzheimer's or schizophrenia or other mental illness? Should marketers be allowed to use fMRI to optimize the price of a widget? What about lying?

That said, I think I'm egregiously digressing -- your points are more about COULD than SHOULD. And yes, rather than the new phrenology, it seems as if peeling back the layers of the brain has actual diagnostic and therapeutic potential. The Baylor study you cite is a great example. At the very least, I hope finding neurobiological roots of mental illnesses could help remove the stigma from these diseases -- making them more a medical problem than a "flaw" of the afflicted.

Yes, if continuing research can eventually show that borderline personality disorder, or any mental illness really, is due to very specific areas of the brain not working properly, or specific transmitters not being present (or too abundant, etc.,)... in other words if physical, organic causes can be discovered as the core factor, then perhaps the stigma of mental illnesses in general and personality disorder in particular can be alleviated.

So hopefully in the future borderline pd (for example) would be like having an "astigmatism" in the brain, and could be as easily corrected as poor eyesight is able to be corrected or compensated for these days. Who knows, perhaps even the tragedies of traumatic brain injury, or mental retardation or senile dementia or severe autism could be prevented or cured. I guess I am just a wild-eyed optimist, but I truly see real hope, real potential in the progress being made in the hard sciences these days, much more than the "soft" sciences, toward alleviating human suffering.

Fascinating. I have a few folks I'd like to put into the machine for an analysis! Simply for absolute verification of my personal observational analysis, of course. Narcissists are pretty easy to spot.
The ethics of application will be thrashed out over time, I'm sure. The information is very interesting right now though.
I read something else today on a German experiment on heartbeat as a personality determinant. I find all this new research totally interesting.
Thanks for the blog post!

Whether a person retains ownership in the house or whether the property is repossessed instead of debt obligations depends over a amount
of factors super real upon
receiving her next paycheque, she is required to
pay back the payday advance lender $1,250.

It sounds like the method they used was transcranial magnetic stimulation, not fMRI (although they probably used some sort of anatomical/functional imaging to localize the mPFC in each subject). It's also worth noting that it isn't quite accurate to describe the mPFC as the "home of your sense of self." Researching "the self" in cognitive neuroscience has been notoriously difficult largely due to the fact that it is an incredibly difficult thing to conceptualize for experimental interrogation. For example, your sense of self can be examined through self-referential thought, memory retrieval, proprioception and the knowledge/awareness of your own body, etc. All of these things rely on vast neural networks that, while overlapping in some regards, can't necessarily be reduced to a single module of the brain. Finally, it's one thing to say that these studies might be useful in identifying proxies for narcissism, but I'd say it's more of a stretch to use them as a clinical diagnosis for something like NPD (although we're likely well on our way to being able to do that).

Sorry, I don't mean to be nitpicky. I also have to admit that I haven't actually read the manuscript myself, so I'm not 100% sure on their methods - there were just a few things I wanted to point out.

Since you are a research scientist in a human memory and neuroimaging lab, I wonder if you would be willing to measure the brainwaves of someone watching TV. As someone working in a neuroimaging lab, I would imagine you have have access to an EEG machine. This would only take about 30 minutes of your time, to compare 10 minutes of watching TV with 10 minutes of reading, and/or 10 minutes of drawing and/or doing a puzzle, etc.

I have a basic EEG machine at home, and when I did that experiment, I found that the Gamma brainwaves practically disappeared while watching TV. The effects of TV on Gamma brainwaves is important because:

"Analyzing the children’s EEGs (electroencephalograms), Benasich and her research team found that those with higher language and cognitive abilities had correspondingly higher gamma power than those with poorer language and cognitive scores. Similarly, children with better attention and inhibitory control, the ability to moderate or refrain from behavior when instructed, also had higher gamma power."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081021120945.htm

TV causing Gamma brainwaves to disappear would provide a physical mechanism to explain the Spongebob experiment:

“Young children who watch fast-paced, fantastical television shows may become handicapped in their readiness for learning, according to a new University of Virginia study published in the October issue of the journal Pediatrics.”

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110912075658.htm

Why would TV effect Gamma brainwaves? Because TV stimulates “involuntary attention” and it turns out that Gamma brainwaves disappear during “involuntary attention”:

“Gamma-band response was linked to voluntary shifts of attention, but not to the involuntary capture of attention. The presence of increased gamma responses for the voluntary allocation of attention, and its absence in cases of involuntary capture suggests that the neural mechanisms governing these two types of attention are different."

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/27/44/11986.abstract

I'm not saying your should get a grant and publish the results of a TV study (although that would be great), just asking you to do the experiment for yourself, to see the results, for yourself.

Thanks, Tyler. I think you're absolutely correct that imagining the mPFC as the *only* structure involved in sense of self is a simplification. In part, it's a problem of semantics -- what do you consider the "self"? In this study, they looked only at a person's ability to recognize pictures of him or herself. In short, Do you know yourself? (This is a large component of this sense of self, but you're probably correct in pointing out it's not the only.) This specific ability does, in fact, seem to live in the mPFC. With mPFC functioning, you recognize yourself; with it malfunctioning, you don't (unless the subject is a narcissist). Now *interpreting* that fact gets tricky...

Is there a connection between multiple concussion and loss of empathy? I thought I'd read it somewhere. Also what a great device for settling custody disputes with well self-presenting sociopaths who consistently endanger the children but always get away with it. I have just been through a nightmare divorce with such a man. The statistics are bad: Less than 2 percent of mothers are lying who accuse fathers during divorce of abuse. But 75 percent of accused fathers win custody. 11 percent of the children thus reassigned committ suicide: This is a crises. (Statics from Canadian justice department study.)

@Anonymous,
I have to say that I'm very highly skeptical of your 'statistics' above. From everything I've seen of the justice system, and what I've learned about human nature, I'd expect almost the reverse to be true. And this seems to be borne out by any Justice Canada studies I've seen.

So I would appreciate if you would cite your sources. Otherwise I'll consider what you've written to be propaganda.

I say this as a Canadian woman who's been researching this area. Mainly because my mother falsely accused my father of abuse in their divorce. In fact, she was pretty much the textbook definition of the perpetrator of 'parental alienation'. Not to mention that she was my sexual abuser. Interestingly, the Justice Canada statistics re: the percentage of female sexual abusers appears to be remarkably low. Except no-one seems to notice that they are willing to publish 'statistics' re: female offenders, but not to actually study it. But, for the record, Justice Canada has a much better track record here than Public Health Canada whose statistics and research are based, in my opinion, largely on ideology - not science.

That said, I somewhat agree that better determination of narcissism in family law and custody disputes *could* help protect vulnerable children. My main concern is that there is danger in the over-application of any particular scientific breakthrough without hard evidence, context, and appropriate checks and balances.

But sometimes we're using bazookas to swat flys. If our intent is to actually protect children in custody disputes, a better solution would be to take the singular focus off of the parents in adversarial disputes (which logic would tell us have low odds on being beneficial to those same children), and to give those children their own legal status (instead of being treated/regarded as chattel to be fought over by parents) and focus on their needs and rights.

After all, given the tsunami of serious and often fatal child abuse happening in NA, I'd warrant it's not only narcissists who harm their children.

I don't recognize myself in photos. I frequently see group photos, recognize everyone but myself, and then (this only takes a second or two) realize it's me by context and clothing. Does that mean my medial prefrontal cortex is blasted from the get-go?

This is an older article now, especially since I know that there has been a lot of new info in the last couple years..
What were the groups and how did he find a group of people that had NPD vs "normal"?
How does one come up with a definitive test when it's impossible to tell for sure, who really has NPD in the first place?.. and I'm asking this along with much info added by different comments from other people..
I do believe that NPD is a different brain set-up.. I've read that it's a disorder (because the empathy brain center isn't developed and the "self" brain center can be overdeveloped) rather than brain damage but I still don't get how severe trauma during childhood wouldn't be brain damage in the NPD adult..